The Food Box the Government Handed Out in 1935

If your household was on relief in 1935, you didn't get money for food. You got food. Actual commodities, handed over at a distribution point, in a quantity somebody else had decided, of things somebody else had chosen. Flour. Lard. Dried beans. Cornmeal. Canned beef. Powdered milk. Prunes. And sometimes grapefruit, arriving by the crate in a northern city in February, for reasons nobody could explain. You took what was in the box. You couldn't choose, you couldn't swap, and you had no way of knowing what would be there next month. Then you had to cook it — which is why the commodities arrived alongside printed recipe leaflets, and why an entire small profession existed to teach households what to do with what the government had given them. This is what was in the box, why it was food rather than cash, and what it was like to carry it home past your neighbours. Harlan Fenwick keeps an almanac of what America ate between 1929 and 1941. Harlan Fenwick is a character. The records are real. #greatdepression #foodhistory #1930s #americanhistory